1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a method of manufacturing light emitting element.
2. Background Art
There have been known methods of mounting a semiconductor light emitting element (hereinafter may be referred to as a “light emitting element”) such as a light emitting diode (LED) or a laser diode (LD) on a wiring substrate, such as face-up mounting in which a light emitting element is placed with its main emission surface, a surface having electrodes, facing upward, and the electrodes and the wiring on the wiring substrate are electrically connected by electrically conductive wires respectively, or flip-chip mounting (face-down mounting) in which electrodes provided with a bonding means such as a bump are placed downward to bond the wiring on the surface of the wiring substrate.
Generally, a light emitting element has, on a substrate, an n-type semiconductor layer, an active layer, and a p-type semiconductor layer stacked in this order, and electrodes connected to the n-type and the p-type semiconductor layers respectively are needed to be on a same surface side. For this reason, the light emitting elements employ a structure in which an n-side electrode is disposed on an n-type semiconductor layer exposed by removing a part of the p-type semiconductor layer and the active layer which are upper layers. As a result, a step difference corresponding at least to the thickness of the active layer and the p-type semiconductor layer is created on the bonding surface of the n-side electrode and the p-side electrode respectively. Particularly, in the case where the light emitting element to be mounted by way of flip-chip mounting, mounting of the light emitting element in parallel to the wiring substrate becomes difficult to achieve. For this reason, a light emitting element having a structure to facilitate flip-chip mounting is disclosed for example in Patent Literatures 1 to 3 (JP2003-7929A, JP2011-204840A, and JP2012-23328A), in which, a region of the electrode forming surface where the electrodes or bumps are not disposed is enclosed with an insulating material such as a resin (an insulating member) and then grinding or the like is performed on the surface thereof to obtain a flat mounting surface (bonding surface).